This is merely a temporary nadir in religiosity. Religiosity will pick up as the transition of the dominant religion in Britain from Christianity to Islam matures. The current census already shows this.

Not sure about that. Only 4.8% of people answering the census put "Muslim"; yes, that's up from 3% ten years ago, but it's not exactly looking like it'll be dominant any time soon. Whereas the "no religion" answer went from 14.8% to 25.1%. (The same proportionate rise, and a much larger absolute rise).

Also, the lion's share of the rise in the share of the population of Islamic belief has been due to immigration; in the current economy, Britain looks a lot less tempting for economic migrants, so this rise may not be sustained. A slightly higher birth rate may well be maintained, but this takes generations to make any real impact, and conversion rates are really very low (although to be fair, so are deconversion rates).

I think that remark is probably tongue-in-cheek, particularly given that a large proportion of the 59% still ticking "Christian" would appear to be doing so on the basis of culture rather than actual belief or practice (search for the Ipsos MORI poll commissioned by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science for evidence of this). In a society which is largely secular the concept of a descent into godlessness is not a majority view.

Knowing who commissioned a poll can be reason for scepticism and you'd be right to want to check the methodology and the questions asked. Dismissing it out of hand simply on the basis of who commissioned it is just lazy.

Any poll commissioned by an interested party that produces a result welcome to that party should be dismissed out of hand; that is the only way of discouraging interested parties from commissioning polls. If a few honestly and scientifically conducted polls get thrown out with the bathwater, too bad.

Well, fortunately your pet peeve has no bearing on whether this particular poll was well conducted or not or whether its findings constitute evidence. I submit that it was and that they do, and putting your fingers in your ears and going "la la I'm not listening" doesn't further the debate in any way.

The Dawkinsites are an anti-religious religion, no better than that. And what is your evidence that the poll was well conducted by persons not influenced by awareness that if they produced an unwelcome result it woudl not be conducted?

"Dawkinsites", "...are a...religion", "...make a nuisance...". You really do like to make characterisations of those you disagree with, don't you? I'd guess they don't see what they're doing as "making a nuisance" and that they feel they have real issues they're actually concerned about. If you don't share those concerns that's fair enough, but your belittling language and dismissive attitude aren't the way to persuade anyone.

The only thing of which I wish to persuadew anyone is that some people *will* not be persuaded by any arguments whatsoever. That after all is how the British people reacted to recent arguments for constitutional refoem; you may call it fingers in the ears and saying la-la-la if you life, but it's pretty effective none the less. As the proverb has it: 'As you are master of your tongue, so am I of my ears.'

Strange - that's certainly not the argument you started with. And the British people weren't provided with a balanced picture of constitutional reform, or a choice between appropriate options, since AV was almost nobody's preferred method. It was therefore unsurprising that they voted against. I'm not sure I see what point that example is supposed to illuminate.

By the way, what constitutes a "Dawkinsite"? How would I know if I was one?

By Dawkinsite I mean a member of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. And the point about constitutional reform is that hardly anyone could even be bothered to take an interest; the Conservative right could rebel against House of Lords reform safe in the knowledge that the public couldn't care less.

The demand that public life be rearranged to suit its opinion, merely out of regard to truth and reason. (Note that I do not say 'supposed truth and reason', though some might, since I accept the claim as a matter of my private opinion.)

If by *religiosity* you mean something like, "formal code for being nice," then I would suggest there is a flaw in the question. Reference C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity," "Beyond Personality," or "The Great Divorce." (Yes, I like Lewis.)

Much depends on what you want to measure and why. Much also depends on what you actually *can* measure. Is there an objective measure for a subjective idea like devotion? (Funny how the question changes when you use *devotion* instead of *religiosity* or something equally sterile.) I guess you could start executing people and find out (if fewer atheists demonstrated their faith by dying than Christians, what would that signify statistically?), but that would be much like the electron tunneling mentioned below.
And what would it mean anyway if there were merely one Christian left in the world? What would atheism win in that case? Is an omnipotent god bound by statistics?
Ask Blaise Pascal about what you should wager on such a question, statistically speaking.

@Tanker Toad - Pascal's wager is totally flawed. By committing to one idea of a god and/or heaven, you are not increasing your chances of being "saved" after you die. You only increase your chance of being "saved" by that idea. i.e. there are tens of thousands of other ideas of gods and heavens and hells and so by choosing one, you are rejecting all the others, leaving yourself with as much chance of going to a heaven or a hell as someone who doesn't commit.
It seems that "statistically speaking" educated people are understanding statistics and coming to the conclusion that god is not necessary.

I am both amused and dismayed by the ignorance of those secularists describing those who have religious beliefs as "ignorant and backwards".

First of all WE ALL HAVE FAITH. You can have faith in yourself and your own understanding, you can have faith in science and wider society or you can have faith in God. So even an atheist has faith - faith in themselves or in science/opinion of others.

History has shown us time and time again that those who have faith in themselves and believe they have divine rights (such as Julius Caesar declaring himself a living God, a claim which was refuted by the dagger of a rival piercing his tyrannical heart) are destined for spectacular failure, from Roman times to contemporary Libya or North Korea.

Now I hold several degrees, one of which is in physics. I am fairly certain I know more about maths and pure science than most who are commenting here. I am also fairly certain that faith is just as necessary in physics as it is with religion - for instance we can come up with theories on why electrons behave as they do. We have our Heisenberg principle and Schrodinger's equation which describe electron behaviour in terms of probabilities. Testing these theories leads us to counter-intuitive results such as an electron's ability to quantum mechanically tunnel. Of course the uncertainty principle means that as soon as we observe the electron tunnelling through a potential well, the electron is no longer there. Faith is required in the mathematical theory, the assumptions used in models and the results yielded. We still do not know why any of these things are as they are (just as we have no idea WHY there was/is a "Higg's Field" permeating our universe), we just take it on faith as it is currently beyond our understanding. Of course you won't need me to list the countless examples of scientific theories (or research papers as TE article "To he that hath") being revised or proven wrong. Now I appreciate it is the nature of scientific research that theories are published, revised and disproved, however, does the continual renewal process not clearly illustrate that faith in science or a particular man-made theory always has a life-span? At least with religion the fundamentals remain constant over time - unless of course you are Catholic and believe the Pope can re-write God's will on personal whim or on investment advice from his Cardinals.

I will state that it is the atheists who are ignorant and backwards, relying 100% on their fragile and pitiful understanding of the universe (no finite mind can comprehend an infinite universe of infinite complexity) to explain their reality. Such hubris has been a thorn in man's existence since records began and no doubt will gather momentum as future generations become ever more disconnected from history and their realities in favour of a virtual existence and popular culture.

As one surveyed respondent in Britain replied, "Religion just isn't the done thing nowadays. Sundays are all about shopping now, or maybe football. These are the gods that have replaced the God of Christian religion. Christmas is about the economy, not the birth of Jesus and Easter is about chocolate".

As I already stated, we ALL HAVE FAITH, the only difference is whether we have faith in ourselves and the works of man or acquiesce to a greater power whose omnipotence balances the Earth in a universe of unimaginable chaos and ever increasing entropy.

This trend is as the TE suggests, "a descent into godlessness" rather than the lauded comments of secularists here of "ascent into godlessness". I for one will never be so foolish as to assume my fragile mind can comprehend the complexity and scale of the universe we live in... can you say the same?

Final thing. Some here are saying that there is no benefit to religion, citing the US and Middle East as devout cultures with much violence, crime, inequality etc and Norway as being secularist, peaceful and successful.

Well, Northern Ireland surely takes the biscuit on religious scales. Side-stepping theses issues and dealing with quantifiable results, a report this week stated that Northern Irish schools are now in the top 10 worldwide for maths and science skills. Clearly the Republicans in NI have strong cultural resonance with Catholicism and Unionists strongly resonate with Protestantism - yet in a society that breeds religious intolerance as a community value, the performance of the children of this society in mathematical sciences is as good as anywhere in the world. All this with an economy heavily dependent on the state (60 cents/dollar spent comes from Westminster), deep-rooted community segregation (a major factor measuring inequality and health) and centuries old tendencies for NI citizens to wage religious war on their neighbours. How then, I ask, do the secularists explain the high aptitude for maths and science in this environment if religion is such a drag on progressive thought?

Faith in one's own abilities or in the scientific method is based on evidence and past experience. They are not blind leaps of faith. A mentally healthy person does not believe themselves capable of outrunning a train or developing supernatural abilities. Most religions require belief in an interventionist entity of unlimited power, which we have little to no evidence for (or, indeed, against). The natural disasters that were previously considered actions of such an entity have been proven to have more logical causes.

While it is foolish to believe one can comprehend everything about the universe, it is also foolish to merely ascribe everything unknown or too complex as being the work or nature of an unseen spirit controlling everything with a predetermined plan for all.

"I for one will never be so foolish as to assume my fragile mind can comprehend the complexity and scale of the universe we live in... can you say the same?"

I'm a humanistic, non-theist and I would absolutely say the same. There is huge range of possibilities between believing in Christianity and believing that humans are capable of understanding all things.

My educational back ground is in archaeology and one thing that I believe that humans are capable of understanding to a reasonable extent is the development of our own history and culture. At this point it is not overly difficult to trace the development of theism and religion in the Middle East (though there are of course numerous areas of controversy).

City states originally had their own patron deities and interaction between city states gave rise to shared, polytheistic cosmologies. As one city state temporarily gained ascendency and dominance over others, or developed a truly unified polity in the case of Pharaonic Egypt, polytheism frequently gave way to henotheism. The development from henotheism to monotheism was not particularly revolutionary or unexpected. The ideas of good vs. evil, final judgment, and a savior born of a virgin all originate most clearly in Zorastorianism and spread into Israel during the Persian Empire.

Faith has its place, but when faced with the enormous evidence of our own history and cultural development why should we assert that Christianity was divinely inspired when all evidence suggests it was the product of cultural evolution like every other religion?

Christianity has contributed enormously to the world just like the other human philosophies like Platonism, Confucianism, or Buddhism; but there is no reason to give Christianity a place of privilege. And if Christianity cannot survive without the myth of being divinely revealed, it deserves to die out.

Let’s start with a few definitions from the Oxford Dictionary:
Faith: 1. trust or confidence in someone or something
2. strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof
Atheist: a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or gods

Now, let’s eliminate the way you use the two different definitions of ‘faith” to form an apparently logical step from “trust” to “god” by replacing "faith", used in the sense of trust, with "trust". Already your argument is looking a bit transparent, I think. Repeating “we ALL HAVE TRUST” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Does it ? While we’re discussing faith, let’s take a look at “faith in science”. My trust is in the scientific method, which has remained essentially what was since the time of Aristotle and before (“Ug, round wheel good, square wheel bad, ug”). Changing a theory in the light of empirical evidence is accepted and expected. It doesn’t break my trust, or pass it’s sell by date, just as in my day to day life, Newtonian physics still works quite well, and Archimede’s Principle keeps my bath mat dry.

Your much vaunted knowledge of physics seems to have been at the expense of history. The “Divine Right of Kings” comes from the Tudor and Stuart Kings/Queens of England/Scotland, as well as Louis XIV of France. This is an assertion that monarch derives the right to rule directly from a christian god, and so cannot be usurped by mortals. It is nothing at all to do with deluded individuals declaring themselves living gods, nor the contemporary leadership of Libya or N. Korea, who, to the best of my knowledge, have declared themselves neither kings nor gods.

Contemporary christianity is very different to that of the 10th C, 15 C ,16 etc etc so it’s plain it doesn’t remain constant. They dropped the Kings James bible fairly recently. Your contempt for catholics is evidence of that.

The rest of your post is self important anecdotes and metaphors, all of which are your opinions, and should not be presented as fact. Your stating that I’m "ignorant and backwards" doesn’t make it so. Yet you have a “finite mind” which is fairly small if you believe that atheism equates to omniscience. Of course I don’t believe I could ever comprehend the infinite complexity of the universe. Nor do I believe you to have a fragile or feeble mind in any way. Nor do I believe Easter is about bunnies and chocolate or Christmas about Santa and presents. Those who do believe that are your simpletons not mine. I believe they are both festivals suborned from the festivals of Eostre and the winter solstice, respectively. Which is not to say I believe in those as gods either.

No I do not have faith. No, I do not know anything about NI, apart from what I saw in Belfast in the 70’s, and I don’t care how good their school reports are, I wouldn’t put any other community through that violence, for any reason. Please feel free to prove that it’s due to religion, because the graveyards in Belfast tell their own story about sectarian violence.

Yes, I do believe religion can be a force for good, many individuals draw a lot of comfort and strength from their religion, and we mustn’t overlook religious charitable works. But then, we shouldn’t overlook secular charities as well: The Red Cross/Crescent, MSF etc.

Live and let live, laissez faire. Enjoy your religion , take as much from it as you want, and give as much as you like to anyone who asks. But I’m just fine as I am, thanks, I really am OK, and that should be OK with you.

So to clarify one thing I do not claim to be a great physicist, I just know from my own experience that there aren't too many physics graduates these days, especially in the UK.

Anyway, I was wondering where you are from? I ask because while Belfast may have experienced some much publicised issues I would feel much safer roaming the streets of Belfast by myself at night than London, Cardiff, Glasgow or Dublin.

The why is pretty simple - take away the paramilitary sectarian element, which is generally contained within particular communities on any given day, and Belfast and NI as a whole has much lower crime statistics than other capital cities. If you want to make me laugh, please tell me you are American and that the US is safer than Belfast. I wouldn't go for gas in that country without utilising my right to bear arms.

The Belfast Telegraph published an article claiming that there is a 14% chance of being the victim of crime in NI (much of which is linked to paramilitaries) whereas there is a >20% chance of being the victim of a crime in England and Wales. According to the British Crime Survey 2011, "Northern Ireland is the safest region in the UK".

According to Queen's University, "Belfast is the most successful region in the UK (on a per capita basis) at attracting foreign direct investment".

So when you say you, "wouldn't put a community through that violence, for any reason", you are somewhat missing the point that those more godless cities in the mainland UK are much more damaging for your health and your pocket than zealous Belfast. So why not promote religion then, if non-religious folk commit more crimes and create even more fractious communities than religiously polar NI? To steal a quote, "I wouldn't put a community through that violence, for any reason".

One last thing. Religion can be an overwhelming power for good and neoteric change in the world. Just consider Francis Hutcheson, a Scottish Presbyterian born in Ireland (Ulster-Scot). Hutcheson was a very devout man but welcomed dissenters of all faiths (Catholic, progressive Protestant), protecting them from the crown-sponsored religion at great personal risk to himself. Hutcheson wrote the legal framework for the US colony to rebel against the British crown, coined the phrase "unalienable rights" and pretty much laid the entire foundation for the property-owning capitalist democracy that we now know as the United States of America.

Strange to think we owe much of our civil liberties, religious freedom and corner stones of what we believe to be our modern, secularist society from a devout Ulster-Scots Christian.

You say you are "just fine as I am". Well friend, I tell you that without evangelical Christians you would be a heck of a lot worse off materially and in terms of civil liberties than you are now - and those things, important as they are, are not the most valued gifts that religion has to offer...

Thanks for your considered response. It'd be boring if we all thought the sane, hey. Fair play, Belfast may well be a perfectly lovely place now: but it certainly wasn't in the 70's. You seem to be saying that somehow the community has benefited from the troubles, and that religion was not the cause of them. If you’re holding Belfast up as an example, my explanation would be the spirits of the communities have triumphed over the religious war, and despite the sectarianism, not because of it.
You say I'm missing your point, but I can say, just as validly, that you're missing mine. I referred to "putting a community through that" to try to illustrate that it seems ridiculous to link the sectarian violence to school outcomes 40 years later. Again, I don’t accept there’s a link between professed religion and crime rate. You’d rather be on the street of Belfast than London, because of the religions followed by the population? I don’t think you can separate paramilitary elements for the overall crime rates in any meaningful way. That would be like separating Mafia and Yardie crime out of the London crime rate, and equally pointless. In London, the number of Christians in 4 London Boroughs increased 01>11. Can you produce the stats to show that the crime rate has decreased accordingly, normalised against neighbouring Boroughs? When I lived in Cricklewood and Harlesden I had to be very careful about the Irish pubs, particularly in Kilburn: Some were Orange and some were Feinian. Either would give you a kicking if you said the wrong thing or didn’t contribute to their cause. From when I lived in Camberwell, I know that the populations of Brixton and Peckham have a very high rate of Christians: Those of Jamaican descent are often Pentecostal, Baptist, Rasta, all Christian, all on the streets going to chapel on a Sunday. Yet I never felt safe in those places unless I was very obviously with my Ras. So no, I wouldn’t promote religion: I don’t accept there’s any correlation with crime rate, let alone a causal one.
The point is we can all cherry pick to make a point, as you have cherry picked the points you want to answer.
I do believe religion can be a force for good, I was careful to state that. I do not believe it’s an “overwhelming power for good”. I believe in humanity, and that individuals, wherever they are born, whatever their race, colour , creed, gender or age have the potential to be good or evil, and that the same person can, without changing any of those determinants, be both good and evil at different times. You use the founding fathers as an example. It’s unsurprising that they were Puritans. As I’ve said above, good things can be done by religious people. Yet it was the descendants of these people (among others, I grant) who went on to all but extinguish the indigenous people and the Bison. Similarly the Civil war was fought over slavery by their descendants. Talking of which, I don’t know about Hutcheson, but Washington, Jefferson and Sedgewick were all slave owners. What was it about these three that allowed them to write “all men are created equal” etc., whilst still owning slaves? This is surely the mark of a bad person and a hypocrite? Genesis 9:25-7, Leviticus 25, Exodus 21:2 , Exodus 21:7-11, Ephesians 6:7-9, that’s what. The Bible, both Testaments. The black men were considered to be the sons of Ham, forever cursed to be slaves, and while protection for slaves was set down in the bible, they were still distinctly slaves.
“When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property.” Exodus 21:20-21
Yes, I see what you mean: You could let your slave bleed out, and as long as s/he didn’t die until the third day, you’re OK. How is this a power for good in the world? Atheist, secular people and organisations can be a force for good or ill too.
As for where I’m from, well, I’d hope my spelling, grammar and punctuation would tell you I’m not American. I’m a true born cockney, and have lived a large part of my life in and around London, but have lived and worked widely around Europe and Africa as well. I’ve lived and worked in USA and Asia, but never more than 2>3 months at a time. For the last 7 years I’ve been a citizen of Australia.
And you? My guess is you’re an Orangeman
I don’t know what relevance that has to anything though. Oh, and I’m a BSc in Mining Engineering (even rarer than physicists hehehe). Whether or not those freedoms have been graciously gifted by Puritans in the US, or hard fought for by the Unions and others in the UK, is irrelevant to me. They are what they are, I am what I am. Please don’t tell me anything, it’s not your place to. What is your view of other religions, Islam, Buddhism, Sikh and Hindu ? Excepting the Catholics, of course, we know that already.

For all your intelligence and education, you seem too satisfied with the idea that "if we don't know about it, it must be god."
I do not claim that we can know it all. But if I claimed that goddunnit, then what motivation do I have to explore and advance my knowledge?
Faith, as you define it, equates to hypothesising. As a scientist, you must know that not only is this allowed, but it is encouraged by non-religious people.
"At least with religion the fundamentals remain constant over time" - this is just not true. There are no two people in the world who have had the exact same idea and understanding and applications of their religion. It is totally dependent on individuals. It is not empirical. On the other hand, an Arab airline, a North Korean airline, and a Norwegian airline take off from a runway all following the EXACT SAME LAWS and will do for a lot longer than religion is around.

I disagree with your statement on the Catholic Church, where you stated the pope can re-write God's will on personal whim or on investment advice from his Cardinals. This is precisely one of the reasons Catholicism is intrinsically logical. The pope has no authority to change matters of dogma or doctrine, only discipline. The pope can never make homosexual marriage ok, abortion ok, contraception ok, or any of these things because these are permanent truths. He only has power to change matters of discipline or institute new dogmas (new in the sense they are defined as dogmas, not new in the sense that they are contradictory to the Church's unofficial beliefs on the issue). All other religions will succumb to the zeitgeist (look at Anglicans and homosexuality) because they have no set definitions, no set morality, basically no truth. Truth does not change.

I don't think this is a significant as, say, seeing such the same trend in the Muslim world or the American South. For, already, Anglicanism is perhaps the mildest and most tame of all religions, and there really is but a small step from there to a life void of religious dogma.

Anglicanism is a broad church, embracing some branches which are as you describe, and some which really aren't. Overall, it's a pretty mild religion, but isn't a competitor for the most chilled overall; that, to my mind, would almost have to be Unitarianism.

How many persons in today's world are truly religious (of any faith or philosophy)? Certainly much less than 50%.
Today's dominant religions are materialism (not the one of Marx, but that of possession of material goods) and nationalism. Even pretense religious and ideological disputes are badly disguised disputes of sects of these two faiths.

Im a firm believer that creatures who derive comfort from conducting imaginary conversations with gods ,expecting them to take care of their problems are beyond help.Would it be too offensive to declare that I hold all believers for nut jobs?

It is quite surprising that almost 50% of British today are not Christians anymore, compared to the higher percentage of 71.9% just a few years ago. This declining tendency seems no halt according to the statistics by the Eocnomists. Such decline may puzzle many concerned, as they may acquire a clear image of British in their long history, traditional, religious, and the like. What had happened in this country, why and when multation occur?
People may not be shocked if lower number of people believe in their gods in romantic cultures today, but not for English. English are totally different from their European neighbors and Americans in things of all kinds, including their belief adherance and conservatism. That pride and arogance are unfolded in their eyes. You will not miss it even today in the media, and even in their chats in Cafe and pubs. The real story may tell something about this. In the late evening, the big and small town pubs and clubs are full of boys and girls, drinking, swinging and kyoodling. This new style of life may change everything. A belief in God or some other almighties are not pursumeably the release from their perplex and pressure. Meanwhile, pursuit of comfort and happiness may have varieties of channels, and a persistant belief, as one of the measurements in history, may have other options, which approach their life and satisfy their daily needs visibly and inresistbily.
This world is changing. It is driven to somewhere we can't easily figure out.

After the fashion of making a competition out of predicting when China's economy will surpass that of the USA may I suggest a competition for predicting when the Muslim population of the UK will overtake the UK's Christian population ?

2032 seems a little early... you may be looking at the London figures. Nationally, Christians in 2011 stand at 59.3% of the population, whereas Muslims stand at 4.8%. If I had to guess, I'd predict that the 2031 census (the nearest we'll get to a 2032 figure) would show something more like Christians 35%, Muslims 10%, but there'd be huge error bars on those estimates, nationally.

Although Christianity may be declining in the UK, this is not the case in the rest of the world. Christianity, especially Pentecostal, Charismatic, and Evangelical Christianity remains the largest and fastest growing religion in the world--despite the demographic decline in traditionally Christian Europe. Most of the growth in Christianity in the world comes through conversion, mostly in Africa and Asia. Islam is not the fastest growing religion. Islam's growth comes from a high birth rate in general and in the West from immigration. The next century will remain a 'Christian Century' essentially because the new Churches beyond Europe are lively, growing and missionary in nature. The older churches in Europe and America, if history has anything to teach us, always seem to experience periodic renewal and revival of religious 'enthusiasm' just when things seem darkest. (Google. Many sites confirm the true statistics of the world's religions.)

I'd dispute your description of the current trends, but not your statement that Islam won't overtake Christianity any time soon. (Partly because the gap between birth rates by religion may not be as big as you seem to think http://www.gapminder.org/videos/religions-and-babies/).

What I'd dispute is your summary of the global trend - the viewpoint on the rise would seem by survey data from 40 medium-to-large countries surveyed in both 2005 and 2011 to be atheism, with religiosity generally falling among Christian countries, and not only within Europe but also the USA, Ecuador, Argentina, South Africa and South Korea: http://redcresearch.ie/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/RED-C-press-release-Re...

This is not to say, though, that it's impossible that over the next century Christianity may retain enough inertia to remain the single largest religious denomination worldwide. It just isn't on the ascendant at the moment.

You are quite right about the sudden drop in Islamic birthrates. I just checked it out and was surprised. In the last decade Islamic birth rates have plunged 38% and should converge with Christian birth rates in 2015.
Yes,atheism has increased in percentage terms, but beyond the West, Japan, and a few other emerging technocracies does not have much field to run in.
One thing is for sure. Everything changes and projections are only projections. Who would have thought that China would have produced more than 100 new Christians in the last 60 years? Or that Korea would become one of the prinicpal Christian missionary sending nations in the 21st century?

You are quite right about the sudden drop in Islamic birthrates. I just checked it out and was surprised. In the last decade Islamic birth rates have plunged 38% and should converge with Christian birth rates in 2015.
Yes,atheism has increased in percentage terms, but beyond the West, Japan, and a few other emerging technocracies does not have much field to run in.
One thing is for sure. Everything changes and projections are only projections. Who would have thought that China would have produced more than 100 new Christians in the last 60 years? Or that Korea would become one of the prinicpal Christian missionary sending nations in the 21st century?

I would think the stats would be hard to find. Christianity grows very well in oppressed countries, but finding Christians to sacrifice themselves for someone else's poll may skew the data somewhat. It is guesstimated that the Church in China is somewhere around 10% of the population. However, the God of the bible is not, on average, one for respecting laws of physics, much less dicey stats on people.

My own experience regarding atheism is that people who supposedly adhere to it do so as a concept, not as a cause. I think it's more akin to agnosticism, if that is a proper term: "I dunno, nobody ever magically appeared to me." Also, there is the perrenial favorite, "I'm basically a good person, I try to be nice," defined as never having killed anyone, paying taxes, and so on. This is a dodgy position, even from a secular point of view: "A person who's nice to you, but not nice to the waitress, is not a nice person."

You make some very good points, Ranson, particularly that "everything changes". We can't predict with any accuracy where we'll be in 2100 demographically on any number of levels. It'll be interesting to find out, though.

I would not mind moving to England and Wales - the society has matured. I wonder when the others will stop getting afraid of God and develop their own confidence level and stop praying to a non-existent being.

What is surprising is that this decline in belief in God comes when the economy of UK is stagnant at a low level. WOW

I would not mind moving to England and Wales - the society has matured. I wonder when the others will stop getting afraid of God and develop their own confidence level and stop praying to a non-existent being.

What is surprising is that this decline in belief in God comes when the economy of UK is stagnant at a low level. WOW

It appears that the increase in the 'no religion' camp has come largely from people of Christian background. This does appear consistent with trends I have seen which suggest that Christians are more susceptible to losing their faith than people in other religious groups. I think there is a historical reason for that (in view of the last some 400 years).

Christianity is about personal faith more than about cultural identity. This is why other religions exercise huge normative compliance on adherents, whereas Christians are for the most part free to decide for themselves. Christianity is one of very few religions that doesn't basically force people to stay Christian - it's easy in, easy out. Not running the risk of your parents and relatives disowning you makes leaving a religion a lot easier! Personally, I think this is how it should be.

"I have seen which suggest that Christians are more susceptible to losing their faith than people in other religious groups."

The Buddhists, particularly in East Asia, also seem extremely susceptible to "losing their faith.". China, Japan, Taiwan, Mongolia, Vietnam, and South Korea are all extremely secular. The large minority of Christians in South Korea are another group of Buddhists who have lost their faith.

I suppose that what all of these countries have in common with the modern West is that the 1. state did not and does not base its legitimacy in reference to a particular religion. 2. communities have non-religious alternatives to churches and temples for ritualism, moral guidance, and community organization. 3. A tradition of intellectual and religious pluralism (though this was temporarily suppressed during the early days of Communism in China and Vietnam).